On Surrender

I’ve been praying a lot recently. I didn’t realize that’s what it was – I’d sink into my body and ask out into the thing beyond me:

I’ve been praying a lot recently. I didn’t realize that’s what it was – I’d sink into my body and ask out into the thing beyond me: where am I? What do you want me to do?

It scratches an itch, to know. To have certainty. God, or the Universe, or the Spirits guiding me, told me about my optimal life path. I must take it, or I will not be living my optimal life. I can feel, just now, falling back into that mind-shape: the tension behind my ears up into my temples; clenched jaw. Tensed around the certainty that I must do the right thing, the correct thing, the optimal thing.

There’s a sweetness under it, an understanding of the shortness of life. I can feel viscerally the imprint of a seventy year regret. Taking a wrong turn in my twenties and never correcting it. This is, perhaps, my greatest fear. Doing something wrong now that closes down the best possibilities for my life.

And so I grasp, I clench, I whir my mind at maximum capacity to find out: what should I do next? There is no forgiveness here, no softness for mistakes. Underneath that, an unwillingness to feel grief.

It’s funny: when I look back at my life, so many pieces of it have already not been optimal. Years spent in the wrong city, the wrong relationship, the wrong college, the wrong friends. This is the life it’s led me to. I’m happy.

And so I’m not actually quite sure what hold this optimizer has on me. It chokes, and when I am choking I like it. Vision narrows and what’s left is all that matters. It’s self-reinforcing.

The answers I’m receiving to those prayers make sense. They’re compelling. I want to do them. I don’t actually think they’re wrong. And yet there’s a hubris in it, in thinking it would be better if I knew everything ahead of time. The plan, the trajectory of my life. If I needed to know it, perhaps they would’ve made sure to tell me.

And so maybe my piece is not to meddle. It’s to stay open, to listen. Not to prod, beg, demand. Hear when I am spoken to, and trust that when I am not, nothing of great importance is being said.

In these moments I can appreciate: the dogs, the grass, the fog. A late-night blanket fort. Perhaps this is not existentially the most optimal place for me to be. I can still want to optimize. But the sickness of it, its grip: listen, it’s only useful to optimize when the metric you are optimizing matters. Perhaps these details of this life just don’t matter all that much. I’ll hear about the ones that do. In the meantime: in this life path of wrong turns and near misses, I am happy.